Pages

About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Military Review, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Monday, February 25, 2013

The NATO Recruiting Office

Europe's defense capacity is a joke despite the amount of money they spend on their militaries and the number of people wearing a uniform. We simply can't expect them to reverse that trend. Let's treat Europe as a recruiting pool for military efforts that we lead.

Europe once was a military power—many military powers, in fact. But no longer. Today Europe is turning into a continent without a military. ...

No amount of whining by Washington will change this reality. There is no political will to increase outlays. And despite the Europeans’ unwillingness to fulfill their alliance responsibilities, some of them have criticized the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia. Panetta claimed that “Europe should not fear our rebalance to Asia; Europe should join it.” But the likelihood of the Europeans deploying military personnel in Asia is about as likely as the Europeans conquering Mars.

The Europeans rightly fear that the “pivot” will shift U.S. military resources from Europe. Yet there is no compelling reason why Washington should continue to protect the populous and prosperous continent from largely phantom threats.

Europe barely defeated Libya, for God's sake, and took far longer to do it than they assumed. And it took a Libya wracked by civil war and a substantial assist from America to do the job. It was a closer thing than you think, in my opinion.

It is time to stop trying to get Europeans to build even small versions of our military. We can't lead from behind when there is nothing in front.

And the idea that NATO will pivot to Asia with us is ridiculous. I count it a success if our European allies just decline to sell China military technology useful to kill our military personnel.

Let's just get the European to make whatever they are willing to field good enough to take the field at our side if we can round up a coalition of the willing for the problem at hand. That's what we need to do anyway, so why not accept it? Think of the dribs and drabs of European military assets as a source of tribal auxiliaries to attach to our actual military.

I take exception to the idea that there is no compelling reason to protect Europe from phantom threats. One, you never know when real threats will emerge. Once they do, we may not have the will to rebuild what we abandon in Europe. And the Europeans might be too frightened to accept our help (calling it "provocative" or some such rot). So best to stay as insurance, no?

Remember that "leading from behind" essentially assumes we can get allies to fight for our interests. Libya worked because it was in Europe's interest to fight the war. I argued for that interest all along as a reason to let Europe handle the job. They let us handle Iraq, for the most part, alone. Same with Afghanistan. There are honorable exceptions by allies who shed blood at our side at one point or another (Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Britain, and Poland, off the top of my head, have my gratitude), but they were and are more rare than the war tourists who went along for the t-shirts and snow globes, with more caveats than capabilities in their kits.

So even if we could get Europeans to build up their militaries, we can't get them to fight for us. Let's just accept that only we will fight for our interests and seek the most effective way to get real allied help when our interests coincide. Even if select European states decide to rearm, Europeans will rely on us to take the lead anyway. Even France's commendable effort to rout the jihadis in Mali was a fairly tiny expedition (yet still required substantial American help):

Going into Mali there were only about two thousand troops heading north, and only a few hundred of those were commandos. But like their American counterparts, the French have elite infantry units (airborne and Foreign Legion) who were flown in (or parachuted in) to assist. The basic French tactic was to use months of air reconnaissance to identify buildings where the al Qaeda men were staying in the dozen or so major towns (and a few cities) in northern Mali they occupied. Using a dozen or so fighter-bombers and several hundred smart bombs and missiles, these al Qaeda targets were hit. Then, when the commandos approached the al Qaeda held town in their Patsis (or even lighter vehicles) they would call in smart bomb strikes as needed.

Our tankers and surveillance were key to getting French troops to Mali and allowing that air support to work. But how often is a threat going to be small enough for our European allies to handle? When their capabilities continue to drop? If we treat Europeans as tribal auxiliaries, we might be the ones to organize and lead a force with a couple thousand French plugged into our organization to carry out the mission. It might not even look much different than the way it turned out. But at least we'd be clear from the start what our allies can and can't do.

StatCounter

Search This Blog

Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.